Why Are Fitting Rooms So Awful?
Stores Try To Beautify Spaces, ‘Seduce’ Shoppers to Buy More With Better Lighting, Mirrors, Design. Now stores are making a big push to transform the dingy fitting room into a more flattering space. It’s part of an ongoing struggle by retailers to coax consumers to spend more. Having saturated the market with stores over the last decade, they can’t expand to increase sales. Instead, companies are trying to squeeze more profits out of their current fleet.
Retailers are taking steps to battle a sales killer: the dressing room. As Elizabeth Holmes explains, by fixing up the rooms, stores can increase the odds customers will buy clothing. Customers who try on clothes in fitting rooms have a conversion rate—meaning they ultimately buy something they tried on—of 67%, according to retail consultant Envision Retail Ltd., of Surrey, England, based on observations of more than 8,000 shoppers. Customers who don’t use the fitting rooms have only a 10% conversion rate. Shoppers who use the fitting rooms spend a third of their in-store time there.
Aesthetically, the dressing-room makeovers are an attempt to go from bland and barren to comfortable and inviting, as if the shopper is trying on clothing in her own home. Chandeliers are cropping up in luxurious anterooms, where racks of camisoles hang waiting to smooth the unexpected bulge. Inside the fitting rooms, wallpaper and back-lit mirrors aim to flatter, not frighten. Stores are focusing their design efforts on dressing rooms in the women’s clothing sections. Men tend to buy without trying on in the store, says Paco Underhill, founding president of Envirosell, a retail behavioral research and consultancy firm, who has timed men’s visits in stores.
The lighting in fitting rooms is just awful! I used to think to myself, “don’t they want to sell these pieces?” Those old fitting rooms are age capsules. They have the power to make even Cameron Diaz look old, out of shape and ugly. If you have a friend who needs to chill from an ego trip, take her on a nice visit to Filene’s Basement Fitting Room for a day of shopping. I guarantee that she will see herself in a new light (get it?) and be scarred for life! Men won’t let anyone do that to them. Instead they have hot young girls making personal appointments to “measure” them and stroke their egos in the privacy of their own offices.
Trying on swimsuits in those fitting rooms is the worst! I always take them home to try on in a normal environment. It’s really about time that they stepped up to the plate.